


Til Human Voices Wake Us

by Jane St Clair (3jane)



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-07
Updated: 2011-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-22 08:49:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/236275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3jane/pseuds/Jane%20St%20Clair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Kirk's death (in "Generations"), Spock is still on<br/>Romulus.  But death is a human concept, and a limited one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Til Human Voices Wake Us

**Author's Note:**

> Words in Vulcan and Romulan, and certain key concepts, are borrowed from  
> Diane Duane's magnificent novels "The Romulan Way" and "Spock's World."
> 
> Title respectfully stolen from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred  
> Prufrock."

He sleeps for hours in a warm, dark place.  Sometimes he dreams -- of  
wars in the vacuum of space, of his days here on ch'Rihan, the planet  
that the humans call Romulus, of an older time when he was a soldier and  
a lover and a much younger man.  He dreams of his death and resurrection  
and the time in between when he was part of the mind of a friend.  Not  
infrequently, he dreams of Jim Kirk.

What he remembers best at this late date are the hands.  The fingers  
were always shorter than his own, but amazingly animate.  They were  
always moving.  He dreams of long nights in which those pale golden  
hands stroked his body, tracing cool patterns between his ribs, along  
his thighs.  He dreams of waking to find human digits tangled so tightly  
with his own that he could not tell where his hands left off and the  
other's began.  They were lovers time out of mind.  He still remembers.

There was the time between as well.  Jim was gone but Spock still  
dreamed  of him at night as a happy man in a beautiful place.  No fear,  
no suffering.  Though every file listed the admiral as dead, it was  
more to Spock that Kirk was too far away to touch, but close enough to  
see.  In his waking hours, he knows that this was the time Jim spent  
Nexus.  He knows it was a gradual weaning period from the passion they  
shared in life.

While he lingers on the edge of sleep, the ghost whispers about the  
room.  He kisses it, mentally.  In this time before dawn it is restless.    
Soon they will be leaving.

*Spock*

*yes beloved?*

*now?*

*soon*

A pause.

*now?*

*you always were impatient, beloved*

*I'm sorry*

*this is unlikely*  And a sound of telepathic laughter.

He can't remember anymore when the ghost found him.  A Vulcan could  
never have done it.  The Vulcan katra is too concrete to travel the  
maddening distances between worlds.  Unclaimed, it only dissolves into  
the oblivion of space.  But the human soul is less defined.  No one has  
ever said, "The soul can do this," or "The soul cannot do that."  No one  
ever claimed that a human soul could not travel across the galaxy to  
find its bondmate after death.  He should not have been surprised.

Even so, it took almost a year.  Word had reached him though unnamed  
channels that Admiral Kirk had emerged from some other plane of  
existence, only to die saving a planet of millions.  Vaguely, he had  
felt the dying.  But the bond, madly enough, was still there.  He should  
have supposed it would be.  Jim had told him once that during the time  
of Spock's own death, the bond had still existed, solidly and silent.

And then he woke one morning and he was not alone.  Jim's lips brushed  
his in greeting, frail as a ghost and radiant with joy.

*found you!* Like a child who has won a game of hide and seek.

*yes, t'hy'la, you found me*

*I have a million things to tell you*

He has not mentioned this to anyone.  As it is, people tend to think he  
is a little mad.  On this alien world at the centre of the Romulan  
Empire, he teaches *cthia*, the reality-truth of which logic is the  
beginning.  His own truth is simple.  Ambassador Spock in his hundred  
and sixty-eighth year resides on ch'Rihan, teaches *cthia* to those who  
would know it, and lives every day with the ghost of Admiral James Kirk,  
his lover, wrapped around him in an embrace as close as any they shared  
in life.

The pool in the floor of his room is a natural one, but hands shaped it  
into a regular shape a thousand years ago.  The water in it is so cold  
it hurts.  The brief splash of it across his body wakes him completely,  
so that for a moment he is surprised to still feel Jim's presence.  Then  
his thoughts settle again and he washes himself more completely, letting  
the cold help lift both dirt and sleep from him.  He stands, after, and  
centres himself: a grey-haired half-Vulcan, shirtless in the stone chill  
of an alien planet, standing barefoot and still wet.  

His travelling clothes and cloak are folded next to the pallet that  
serves as his bed.  The transport, a converted farm vehicle that would  
not have been out of place on Soviet Earth, is expected in some twenty  
minutes.  He needs to move on to ch'Havran, Remus.  The next cell is  
waiting there.  He's loved Romulus, the feel of it, Vulcan hardness with  
a very human fire added, and there are days when he is reluctant to  
change anything about it.  In another life, it might have been his  
homeworld.  In this one, it is the only place that still fits the man he  
has become.

He shoulders his pack and waits for Jim to follow him, glittering hazel  
in and out of crevices in the rocks.


End file.
